Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 workshop on Analysis of geographic references - Volume 1

The analysis of geographic references in natural language text involves, at least conceptually, four distinct stages. Of course, implementations may vary greatly in how these stages are interleaved. The first conceptual stage is geographic entity reference detection: strings such as New York, the Amazon delta, LaGuardia, the San Diego-Tijuana border, [the] Brooklyn Bridge, a mile from downtown Manhattan, etc. are identified in the text (Rauch et al). Second, contextual information gathering may help identify the type and approximate location of geographic entities: LaGuardia Airport vs. LaGuardia Community College, the town of Manhattan (population 44,831), etc. (Manov et al, Bilhaut et al). Third is the actual disambiguation of the entity with respect to both type (New York City vs. New York State) and location (Orange County, California vs. Orange County, Florida) (Leidner et al, Waldinger et al, Li et al).